High Speed Inlet Stage for an Advanced High-Pressure Ratio Core Compressor: Numerical Flow Field Prediction and Verification

NASA rotor 37 is among the most popular rotors that have been manufactured to date. It was designed and tested in early 1980’s by Reid and Moore at NASA Glenn Research Center. It consists of 36 blades with multiple arc profiles, and was designed for compressors with compression ratio of 2.05 at mass flow rate of 20.19 kg/s. Also, it was tested in isolation with circumferentially uniform inlet flow so that the flow through it should be steady apart from any effects of passage to passage geometry variation, and mechanical vibration. As such it represents the simplest possible type of test for a real challenge to 3D viscous flow solvers because chock wave-boundary layer interaction is strong and the effects of viscosity are dominate in determining flow deviation and hence pressure ratio. Computational fluid dynamics (CFD) predictions were obtained by ANSYS-CFX 11.0 with k- turbulence model, and were compared with experimental data which has been taken by NASA. The code predictions (with a uniform and spanwise varying outlet static pressure) show good agreement with respect to measured overall performance characteristic, averaged pitchwise distributions, and averaged spanwise distributions. So, the code now is verified to use with the turbulence model, for farther calculation of turbomachinery. Specially, compressors, compressors blades, and compressors cascade.